Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU

Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). Why would a National Laboratory need the capacity to do this? To provide components that were not available commercially. In this case, Sandia’s goal was to make radiation hardened devices for use in weapons and space missions. The harshest environments and where reliability was paramount. Sandia began their fab in 1978 on 2″ wafers on a 10u process, a few generations behind ‘state of the art’. By 1982 this was upgraded to a 4″ wafer system with features as small as 2u. This was the design node that Sandia used to make all the IC’s used in the Galileo space probe (for its mission to Jupiter). This included the 1802 processor from RCA. Sandia received the logic diagrams of the processor and its support chips and recreated them in a radiation hardened process. How many IC’s…